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Enlightenment Now: A Manifesto for Science, Reason, Humanism and Progress

by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane, £25)

Anyone can see that the world is going to hell in a handcart. The great European project looks sick; war and fundamentalism ravage the Middle East; and we’re running out of clean water and usable antibiotics. Most worryingly, a pathological liar in the White House is taunting a nuclear-armed North Korean despot with schoolboy tweets.

But the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has a cure for your despair. In his new book Enlightenment Now, Pinker claims that in the long view things are getting better on pretty much every front. To prove his argument, he offers a profusion of graphs that show positive trends in life expectancy, crime, poverty, the global spread of democracy and all manner of other metrics of progress. For much of the world today, life is better than it has ever been. Enlightenment ideals of tolerance, reason and humanism are winning.

About Prospect Magazine

In Prospect’s March issue: A series of writers turn their thoughts to the developing war over words in the UK and the US. Lionel Shriver, Afua Hirsch, Simon Lancaster, Hugh Tomlinson, Tom Clark and two students ask if free expression is truly compromised? What’s really going on in our universities? And what do voters think?
Elsewhere in the issue: Michael Ignatieff questions why today’s left-wing leaders can’t live up to the high mark set by FDR, Sameer Rahim shows how western powers have been trying to dictate what Islam should be, and Mary Beard asks “How do we look?” as our perceptions of what is beautiful have changes over the centuries.